Blogs

‘Twas the night before peak season

‘Twas the night before peak season, and all through the data center,
Not an engineer was sleeping, not even a tape operator;
The SAN zones were coded in the name server with care,
In hopes that SCSI transactions would soon be there;

The servers were nestled all snug in their racks;
While intervals of low ECTs danced in VIs PAKs;
And Ed Lewis in his ‘kerchief, and LaMair in his cap,
Had just settled their brains for a long sales meeting recap,

When out of the FC protocol there arose such a clatter,
We reached out to Stu Bridger to see what was the matter.
Away to the PDFs he flew with no doubt,
Tore open the white papers and threw up in his mouth.

The protocol lay shattered like new-fallen snow,
Giving a specter of interconnectivity to customers not in the know,
When what to a VW dashboard did appear,
But millions of errors, their source very clear.

With an old HBA driver so buggy and slow,
The SAN guy had warned us that it had to go.
More rapid than 16gig, came errors from disk,
The link sputtered and discarded, and added great risk.

“Now, Reads! now, Writes! now Other exchanges!”
They all stopped in an instant, which was rather strange.
SCSI timeouts were approaching, delays abounded,
All were detected, and alarms were sounded.

And then, in a panic, I heard from the phone ring,
It was the end users, and calling to complain about this thing.
As I drew in my head, and was turning around,
Down the databases crashed, all without a sound.

“Our website is down, our customers are leaving!”
We are losing out on sales! Our CTO is dry-heaving;
Just then, a voice rang out, with unexpected force,
All in the datacenter turned to find the source.

His eyes—how they twinkled! his dimples, how merry!
His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry!
His little mouth was drawn up in a tiny smile,
With a mismatched shirt and tie, this guy had no style;
Regardless of attire, this man stood with conviction,
Letting everyone know he knew what was causing this affliction;
It was Darren, from England, I could tell by his tan,
I knew in a moment, he worked with the SAN.

“What is it Darren?” the whole room seemed to urge,
When these issues arise, onto SAN the blames usually converge;
But with a wink of his eye and a nod of his head
Soon let me know, the HE knew something else instead;

He spoke not a word, but pointed straight at his screen,
with VirtualWisdom already opened, the dashboard could be seen,
And laying his finger on the widget that was red,
His smile grew larger, as he opened his mouth and said;

“No errors detected when the IOPS were dashed,
The Link State has changed, the server simply crashed.”
All heads quickly turned to the server admins who looked solemn—
“Merry Christmas to all, it’s NOT A SAN PROBLEM!”